Farmers say too much rain is a bad thing for their crop

NOXUBEE COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI)- You may look at a rainy day and see it as a good time to be at home and relax.

But for area farmers, those rainy days can be stressful.

Rain Rain Go away.

That phrase isn’t just a nursery rhyme from a children’s book but it’s also what farmers have been saying about the weather for 2 years.

Area farmers plan on planting vegetables like corn at the beginning of April

But many like Jack Huerkamp have had to change those plans due to wet weather.

“It delays planting so as long as it’s wet we can not plant. it has to be dry and it has to be able to go through the field and it’s sticky and the soil just doesn’t do right so you have to have dry ground to operate to plant and until that happens we sit and wait,” said Huerkamp.

Soil, Sun, and rain may be what it takes to make a seed grow but according to Huerkamp sometimes too much of one good thing can turn into a bad thing.

“Too much of a good thing is not a good thing and that’s just kind of the bottom line. with constant rain, we can not do what we need to do. we have to have dry weather to plant. we have dry weather to apply fertilizer and chemicals and anything else that we do. it has to be dry. Nitrogen needs dry weather. a lot of rain will leach nitrogen away. that’s the reason we like to stay on the drier side so the plant just grows better and it utilizes the nutrients in the soil when you are on the drier side,” said Huerkamp.

Huerkamp says that rain may have put a damper on his crop for the year but it hasn’t stopped him from doing what needs to be done and it could have been worse.

“So we are not in a big hurt because we have gone into may before. so we got close but we beat the may date a little bit late April is ok but id rather it be early April. but we are not in a disaster. We’re just not where we would like to be,” said Huerkamp.

Huerkamp said he is now done with corn crops and next on his list is cotton.